Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc.

WE ARE IN a slow-simmering time war. When the clocks fall back in a couple of weeks, some of Ontario will make the change, while part of it (the slice of Northwestern Ontario on central time) will stick with daylight saving time, joining what one minister called “Wab Kinew time,” following the lead of some prairie and west-coast provinces unwilling to tolerate the early sunsets, late sunrises be damned.

They’re not alone, either — around the world, more jurisdictions are bailing on the twice-annual time shift. Rarely has “what time is it?” been so hotly debated. (I’m personally Team Standard Time, if we’re declaring our biases here.)

But as the Financial Times’ Sarah O’Connor wrote recently, these fights go back more than a century, proving there is nothing new under the sun, no matter where it is in the sky and what time the clock says it is.

In the 1920s, sociologists studying Muncie, Indiana, found the town divided not just by class but also by the clock. Working-class households had the lights on by 6 a.m., while the ‘business class’ slept in. It came to a head in 1925, when the town debated whether to adopt daylight saving time. “The working-class early risers argued they would lose sleep, while the businessmen urged the change ‘because of golf,’” she writes.

A century on, the golfers still mostly win — places that ditch the time change mostly ignore the sleep experts and keep daylight time.

But there are bigger time crimes being committed, O’Connor suggested — namely, against night shift workers and the working class more broadly, who are more affected when clock changes start messing with circadian rhythms.

“It is a myth that night-shift workers can become nocturnal over time,” she said, noting that research has found that roughly 97 per cent of night workers never actually adjust. “The correlations with cancer are so clear that night work has been classed as “probably carcinogenic to humans” by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer.

Night owls with day jobs don’t get off easy either — a Finnish study published last month found evening types were 1.7 times more likely to end up on a disability pension within 12 years, even after adjusting for education and type of job. The researchers’ best guess is that "traditional working times interfere significantly with the sleeping preferences of late chronotypes, leading to social jet lag.”

Part of why the time debate gets so tense is that it has clear winners and losers, and the line between them tracks class lines closely. Most American night shift workers have no more than a high-school education, research shows, and the pandemic’s flexibility boom mostly went to white-collar workers who already had some. (In Canada, about 12 per cent of workers are on nights or rotating shifts, according to CAREX Canada, which calculated that figure back in 2011.)

If you’re looking for a sign of the times we’re in, then, look to U.S. President Trump, who wants to make daylight saving time permanent. No surprise here — he’s a prodigious golfer, and he said it would help anyone who’d “like to play golf a little bit without having to run home after 14 holes.” 

CAREERS

The day-one shock

Welcome back! While you were on leave, AI changed everything

IF YOU’RE A fan of job stability and predictability, there’s a new edict in town: Beware of extended absences.

These days, people returning to jobs from which they’ve been on leave are finding the jobs they’re coming back to look radically different. “In a world of constant AI updates,” wrote Business Insider’s Amanda Hoover, “going out of the office, even for a few weeks, can feel like moving toward obsolescence.”

It’s sharpest in tech, according to WIRED, where coding tools like Claude Code have turned the job into something closer to “babysitting” a bunch of coding agents, leaving a cohort of new mothers coming back to jobs they don’t recognize.

When Danielle, a Portland developer, went on leave in mid-2024, barely anybody used AI, but a year later, it was the expectation. “The kind of work I was doing before, I would like to do again. I think I was good at it,” she said. “But I recognize that job will never exist again.”

It’s not limited to techies. Ashley Wallace, head of talent at Praktika, took six months of maternity leave and figured on a gentle re-entry. “I came back thinking, ‘Oh, I’ll ease myself in.’ It definitely isn’t the case in the landscape that I came back to,” she said. A designer named Tina, also back from leave, put it more bluntly: “You spend your whole life and career learning this skill. Just in a couple of months, a couple of weeks, that skill is rendered essentially not useful anymore.”

That many of the workers experiencing this change are women is, some argue, no surprise. Rachel Grocott, CEO of the UK think tank Pregnant Then Screwed, sees it as a new penalty levelled primarily at women who take time off to start families. “It’s yet another way in which women are being screwed over,” she told WIRED. “You’re layering disadvantage on inequality.”

It’s an interesting reflection of what AI is doing to the labour force, and a counterpoint, perhaps, to a narrative that AI is only eliminating jobs. A lot of these jobs are still here, which is a net good, but those people occupying the jobs are finding them unrecognizable after only a few months off.

Whether this is better, worse or just different is a matter of perspective. Hoover tells the story of Max Cherry, a PR professional, who left right when AI was just starting to creep into the workplace. “He found that AI had become part of the daily workflow, rather than something workers used sporadically three years ago — and often in secret,” Hoover wrote. “Catching up required him to shake old habits.”

For some, it’s been a more profound change than they expected, one that even has them wondering if their new/old jobs are ones they want to come back to at all. “I don’t derive meaning from training artificial intelligence, or just fixing code generated by artificial intelligence,” said developer Danielle. “If that is the future of this industry, is that a job I want?”

ECONOMICS

The state of the Canadian side hustle

The reasons for pursuing them are varied, but one thing is certain: The side hustle is now mainstream

NEARLY ONE IN four Canadians now has a side hustle, and another 24 per cent are thinking about starting one, according to a new report from Ownr, the RBC-owned registration platform.

Canadians with side gigs are putting in an average of 13 hours a week, mostly to supplement their income, keep up with the cost of living or pay down debt. “The nine-to-five may be where the workday starts, but for many Canadians, it’s far from where their ambition ends,” writes Ownr CEO Jordan Casey.

Whether or not all these side jobs represent budding enterprises, or just things that Canadians are doing to pocket a bit more cash, remains a debate. Sixty-eight per cent say their side hustle is just something they do for fun and 22 per cent say it earns enough that they don’t need their regular job (more than the 19 per cent say they’re considering leaving their full-time job to pursue their side hustle full-time).

Casey reads the cost-of-living numbers as a hopeful sign. “What that tells me is households are really stretching to keep up, but they’re not being passive about it, and I think that’s the encouraging thing,” he told BNN Bloomberg. However, Casey also cast some doubt that many of these jobs are going to turn into something bigger and more permanent. “It’s daunting for a reason,” he told the Financial Post. “Side hustlers are already short on time and when they’re focused on making the leap to full time, it’s the legal and compliance steps that tend to fall through the cracks — whether they realize it or not.”

Statistics Canada, which counts second jobs rather than side hustles, tends to treat them as a warning sign. (And second jobs are not the same thing as side hustles, it should be said.) It found the lowest-paid workers were more than twice as likely to hold one as the highest-paid. “From a quality of employment perspective, working more than one job may indicate that the main job provides insufficient earnings,” StatCan noted.

That points to a real ideological division between how various analysts are viewing side hustles — one camp views them as a negative outcome from economic precarity, while the other are viewing them as the seeds of future businesses.

When Casey said to Global News that “There’s a lot of entrepreneurial ambition in Canada, and this data proves that even more of it may be hiding in plain sight,” you can just as easily swap in “financial precarity” for “entrepreneurial ambition,” and the sentence remains just as accurate.

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